In Clifford Jackman's The Winter Family, the last half of America in the 19th century is stitched together by a roving band of killers for hire. The stitching is almost battlefield surgery, all blood and pain and booze and urgency. Named for their leader, the stoic, pale-eyed, and seemingly amoral Augustus Winter, the titular Winter Family is an odd bunch made up of a military general, an unnatrualized German, a freed slave, and a booze-ruined Cherokee, all leftovers from the Civil War who aren't convinced that wars are the sort of things that are actually won or lost, let alone ever fully end. With a melange of violence, humour, and pontification, they attend and assist the awkward, sometimes excruciating, growth of a nation trying to define and secure its vision by any means necessary. They punish slave owners in Georgia, tamper with a still struggling democracy in Chicago, and remind a Phoenix lawman that lawless remains the law of that land.
I sat down with Clifford, a lawyer by day who who recently moved to Guelph with his family, to talk about genre, history, and the daily grind of writing.
- Andrew
How'd you come to writing?
I've always wanted to be a writer. I was a writer when I was a little kid. And I was always a big reader, relative to the other kids my age.
What kind of stuff were you reading?
I read pretty broadly. I was an ambitious reader. I wanted to read things above my age level. If I was in Grade 9, I’d be reading stuff the Grade 12s were supposed to be reading. I was under the mistaken impression that it made me cool. Which, in fact, it did not.
Were you reading and understanding?
I would read first and the understanding would come after. When I first read, say, Heart of Darkness when I was 14 years old, I literally had the CliffsNotes there. I would read a page of the book, and then read a page of the CliffsNotes to figure out what I just read. But I always found that once I read one book by a writer, whether it was Joseph Conrad or Charles Dickens or Dostoevsky, I could crack the code [of that writer], and then I was understanding.
I should say that I didn’t just read the classics. That was one half. The other half was fantasy and sci-fi, and I was a huge Stephen King fan. I loved the Dragonlance novels. I was all over Dungeons and Dragons, all over space, all over Lord of the Rings. If this is 1995ish, the stuff you were into – oftentimes called "genre" – was generally considered low entertainment. But if you’re reading that stuff next to Conrad, who himself was writing for entertainment – I mean, those were the entertainment stories of the time – it must have created a personal context. Did you seeing those connections then?
Definitely. After high school, I went to York University thinking I was going into creative writing, and it was a shock. I took this course, Introduction to Literary Genres, and I thought we’d do mystery novels and science fiction novels and stuff, but they took a pretty different approach to what “genre” was. So we were reading people like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. And for me there was a fair bit of resistance to that. I wouldn’t say I hated it, but at the time I was like, Oh, man. These people think they’re cool. But then I went on to get my master's and came to love Woolf, and Joyce, and Faulkner.
I’ve never really believed in the division between "literary" and "genre" fiction. But I get the feeling that that gap is starting to shrink down again. I vividly remember in the 90s Margaret Atwood denying up and down that she was a science fiction writer, or that Handmaiden’s Tale was a science fiction book. As a guy who liked science fiction then, I remember that. But people aren’t nearly so fussed about that I don’t think now. "Genre" was sort of the kiss of death back then. People treated you like crap. There was a shift in the 90s, I think exemplified by authors like Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon. Chabon especially became vocally bored with the suburban, domestic literary stuff that he had earlier made his name with. I especially remember him pointing out that "literary" is as much as a formula as anything else.
I think that’s the thing. I get the idea that around that time authors got bored and readers got really bored.
I think fundamentally… And I don’t want to be rude to anybody because I know everyone’s trying really hard. Writing really hard to do. But fundamentally, when, as a writer, you’re making your list of things to do, you can forget about the reader to a certain extent. Books are a commitment of the reader's time and mental energy in a way you don’t when you just click on shit on Netflix, or when you play Candy Crush or something. If I’m gonna bore a reader… There’re writers I really respect who were boring on purpose. Like The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, which I read in school. I like that book and Sterne makes jokes about how he’s boring you on purpose. At the end of the day if that you want to do, fine. But make sure you think about it.
Ask yourself, Who’s reading this book? Why are they reading it? To me, it seems like that sometimes gets lost. It's easy for a writer's audience to become juries for prizes, or reviewers, because that’s a way to get sales. It’s same if you’re at a convention and there’s a book with a cool dragon on the cover – I’m not saying they’re equal, but they’re similar. They’re a way of selling the book.
You were writing while you were at York?
I was. It took me a long time to finish my first novel. I got pretty far into one, then gave up. It was a retelling of the Hercules myth basically. I got pretty far in another one, a fantasy story again, about a world of two races on it who fought each other. I got stuck and it took me years to finish. What happened was, my second year at York they went on strike. That one lasted 10 weeks. All that time, I did no writing. All I did was play video games. Baldur’s Gate 2 – another nerdy Dungeons and Dragons game.
When I went back to school, I decided I was never going to finish a book ever. I’d had 10 weeks, had nothing to do, and had done nothing. I was 21 years old, so I’m basically old already – that was my thinking process. But then my philosophy changed. I made sure I put down 1 000 words a day no matter what. And I made sure to cut out everything boring. And then, lo and behold, the book got finished, and that was a big moment for me because I knew I could do it. I went on to write a bunch of stories and actually became very productive at school and at work. I got my 1 000 every day for some time.
Then I did my masters [in English Literature] at Queens and struggled on and off with a story there, then took a year off, then went to law school. I had these projects that were sorta fun projects, like science fiction stuff, but then other projects that would be The Thing, would be more publishable. And a lot of the time that stuff wouldn’t go the way I thought it would. It wouldn’t get finished.
What was your idea of publishable?
I had one idea set in the 1980s around this scandal: basically, the CIA cooked up this deal with justice department to not prosecute contras that were smuggling cocaine into the US, and the contras eventually hooked up with this guy, Rick Ross – who, I believe, the rapper got his name from – who was the biggest cocaine dealer in the universe and that fueled the crack-cocaine boom in the 1980s that was devastating to a lot of American inner-cities. So I did all this research and got about 120 pages in and it just died on me.
Then I had another idea about a lawyer set in Toronto and I thought, Oh, now I’m writing from what I know. That’s what you’re supposed to do. This’ll be good. Up to this point a lot of books had failed for me, and this was the first one that ought to have failed, but I technically, on paper, finished it. I had a lot of issues with it, but it was still a big moment, knowing I could finish anything if I have to.
The Winter Family was something I wrote for fun. It wasn’t something that was supposed to be publishable, it wasn’t supposed to be anything. I sat down and, in four days, wrote a much longer version of [the chapter in The Winter Family] "Oklahoma 1891", and I put it aside thinking, That was fun. But at the time my friend had a store in Toronto, Article 8, on College and Bathurst, and we decided to self-publish Oklahoma 1891. His store closed before the book was done. It ended up at the Modrobes store – which is closed now too – and we had the party there. A lot of people came out and I started getting positive feedback to my writing for the first time. This would have been 2008, 2009.
What on earth’s a Modrobe?
I never owned a pair, but they kinda looked like this hospital pant-type things, very popular in college dorms and people would I guess wear them to raves. But then the inventor of them went on Dragons Den and got a bunch of money and opened a store, and that’s where I launched Oklahoma 1891. That story was supposed to be a standalone. Spoiler alert: there’s not much left after 1891. But I ended up writing three prequels and a sequel to it. Eventually, in 2010, I randomly went out to an event in Whitby called DarkFest. One of the events was a PitchFest, where you have 10 minutes to pitch your book. So I pitch my book, saying it’s a western, and here’s who I am, and that’s eventually how I got my agent, Carolyn Forde. But that was, what? Five years ago? So it’s still a very, very long road to where we are today.
That actually worked? I’ve never heard of anything coming from those pitch things.
I think it’s very rare, but it does happen sometimes. The thing is, it’s hard to break into this industry. It’s so hard. And it’s so hard even after you get your deal. There’s so much competition out there. It’s unreal. You put your book on the shelves next to something that was written 2000 years ago, not just the new stuff that came out that month. Have you guys been talking about the market for The Winter Family?
There’s definitely a market. Cormac McCarthy is the name that always comes up, but this Grit Lit stuff is a sub-genre. I hadn’t heard Grit Lit until people started calling my book that. But The Winter Family is also supposed to be a fun book. This has been one of my concerns when I started seeing some of the reviews was that everyone was talking about the violence, but it’s also supposed to be fun. Quill and Quire got that.
It seems now that anyone with a book set in the past, in the desert, with people getting shot, gets hailed as the new Cormac McCarthy.
It sucks. Cormac McCarthy owes a lot of William Faulkner, but no one says he’s “William Faulkner, but not as good” every time he puts out a book. It’s a tough comparison. The Winter Family’s written nothing like McCarthy, although I’ve read all his books, he’s maybe my favourite writer.
I assume Augustus Winter will get compared some to The Judge in Blood Meridian. And probably the way you describe a human being’s ability to come apart will garner similar comparison to McCarthy's famous gore.
But that was a thing I did when I was a kid. We used to do that for fun. My friends and I would get a writing assignment and, because we were horrible… People talk about kids these days being terrible, but the kids in our day were so much worse. Kids today are maybe a bit soft or whatever, but they’re not dickheads like we were back in the day. We'd get creative writing projects, and it would turn into a contest to see who could be the most disgusting. You’d get an assignment about what you did in the summer, and everyone’s head would be getting cut off, or their guts ripped out. It was all a contest between me and my five friends to see who could be the most disgusting. If you did this today, you’d be sent to see the school psychologist. Back then our teachers were just like, “B. B+. B.”
Is it hard for you then, considering that gory glee, to also start bringing in questions about morality?
The theme of the book is caught in that anecdote of Alexander and the Pirates, how these guys aren’t the last breath of freedom before civilization, they are civilization. That’s not necessarily the thesis of The Winter Family, but that’s the question it’s asking.
In terms of the morality of the book, I think, whether we live in a universe with any objective morality, or whether we live in a universe where it’s just whatever your personal prejudices happen to be, and the universe is nihilistic and uncaring. I don’t know if the book comes down on those questions so much as it deals with individuals’ fears and beliefs towards those questions. It was important for the book to not sugarcoat the world outside of civilization. The point isn’t, These guys are terrible and if only we were in a state of nature like Jean-Jaques Rousseau imagined and we're all naturally good. No. Everyone is violent and at the end of the day you have to make a choice, and it’s a tougher choice than you might think.
A character in book I like, that people don’t talk that much about because he was in just the one book, is the city councilman in the Chicago chapter.
I was just going to mention Chicago. I love that these Western outlaws get inveigled in Eastern politics. In Chicago it's community-minded gangster Micky Burns against industry-minded Noah Ross, the brother of one of The Winter Family.
The party in Chicago were oppressed Irish immigrants. They had their own code, too. It’s easy to forget because they’ve now integrated so well, but people like the Irish, Italians, and Germans were horribly discriminated against. Not as bad as other people, but bad. If you go back and read what people were saying about the Irish, their being naturally stupid, inherently criminal – basically racist screeds. So this councilman, Micky Burns, had the philosophy, We stick close to our friends, and yeah we’re stealing our faces off, but paying for funerals and handing out Christmas turkeys and stuff. Of course you can’t just steal all the time, but he saw himself as a big man in the community. There was more to it than just being a thief. He was the head thief, and there’re responsibilities that come along with that.
On the other hand, you have Noah Ross and his pig factory, stripping everything down to efficiency so no one will really benefit, who doesn’t care if the people working in his pig factory are living in disgusting shanty towns by rivers so full of blood they could crust over. But at the end of the day, he’s also not wrong, right? That kind of corruption meant economic growth, and that growth in these cities hauled people up into the middle class.
And then Winter comes along and he doesn’t care. The book doesn’t really have an opinion about what’s right or wrong, but looks at the consequences of certain lifestyles.
The idea of Manifest Destiny is interesting as hell to me, inasmuch as it’s still going on, that there’s this stain in the national cloth, this indelible feeling of rightness, even in the face of what's certainly morally incorrect. We’re reluctant to talk about the amount of violence and deviance that brought us to where we are now. Similarly, the people who use Augustus Winter never seem to know what to do with him once his directed amorality has given them a boost.
To me, I don’t know how useful The Winter Family ever was. People thought they would be useful, but they mostly made things worse everywhere they went. But they get replaced by The Winter Family 2.0, The Pinkerton Detective Agency, who’ll shoot whoever they’re asked to, but honor their contacts as well. To me, Manifest Destiny was opening Pandora’s Box. That’s all in Blood Meridian. You tell people, These Apaches are pissing us off and we’ll pay you for their scalps, everyone runs out and starts scalping anyone they can catch. Then they take all your money until the treasury’s dried up and shoot up your town. You hired horrendous human beings to help you with this problem instead of dealing with it in a human way, you hired mercenaries. That was the thing with The Winter Family. They were tools, but they weren’t very useful tools. It’s not that civilization got to a point where they didn’t need them anymore, they just realized they were never that useful in the first place. That’s civilization learning. These people don’t help us achieve our ultimate goal, which is to reformulate the entire continent basically.
Probably every human being has to be a hypocrite of some sort. Maybe we need to be just a little bit full of shit some of the time. You can’t take every idea to its logical conclusion. Dostoyevsky dealt with these problems. Arthur Koestler talked about them in Darkness At Noon, the idea that logical things brought to their conclusions become absurd.
I hate to be that guy who asks you if you’ve ever seen The Wire, but have you ever seen The Wire?
I love The Wire.
The Winter Family really has a The Wire feeling, inasmuch as it goes up the rungs of power, understanding how corruption and hypocrisy goes all the way to the top. I’m trying to think of other westerns that visit the city the way you did the in the Chicago chapter. There’s this romance of the west – maybe the same way there’s a certain sort of cultural romance to a kind of street life now – that turns that place into a kind of bio-dome, which ignores the fact that the railroads and economy are keeping even the most far off place connected to civilization. For me it’s important that the Winter Family wasn’t just on the frontier. It’s important to say that people are shooting each other in Tombstone, Arizona as much as they are in Chicago. It’s all a democracy that, fundamentally, is unrecognizable by our current standards. Ballot box stuffing, gangs rushing around and battling on the streets. There’s craziness on the fringes, but there’s also craziness as the heart of democracy. So you wrote "Oklahoma 1891" in 2008. You were gradually expanding the history since then?
I wrote the Phoenix chapter, then I wrote California – which has been cut out of the book, but will apparently be released as a digital short. Then I wrote Chicago and Georgia. They were in different orders and there were a lot of edits to make it to the book that’s getting released.
I edited a ton before sending it to my agent, and then we retained an editor to keep at it. Then we sent it out to all the big Canadian publishers, and were rejected everywhere. Then I redid the whole thing and we submitted it to New York, about 10 places. Everyone rejected it. I was devastated. But Melissa Danaczko at Doubleday liked it enough that she offered to work on it in her spare time. Then Anne Collins got on board in Canada and decided to put me up as the New Face of Fiction, which is obviously huge.
How does this experience match up with how you thought it’d be when you started slugging it out with your first novel back at York?
This is a lifelong dream for me, and I’m happy, but it feels weird. If the book's a big hit, that’s one thing; if it’s not, that’s another thing. I guess I’ll always be a writer. You just go on.
One thing I wrote during all those years was a screenplay of Beowulf. I thought I was so smart because I was ahead of the curve, but then three movies came out. They kill Grendel, but the next day Grendel's mother comes around, so I had this scene where Beowulf killed the monster and they’re like, Why aren’t you happy? You killed Grendle who’s been tormenting us for decades. And Beowulf’s like, This is a happy time, but the sun’s gonna come up the next day, and the next day, and other shit’s going to happen. I think that’s how I feel with the book.
I have always wanted to be a writer. There’s one quote from Hemingway where he’s talking about aspiring writers, which he calls "mice." The mouse asks him, When did you start wanting to be a writer. And Hemingway says, I have always wanted to be a writer. There was no when. I’ve always written. I have eight novels that will never get published. And to be here, it just feels weird. I hope that doesn’t sound too negative.
That’s the shit people don’t talk about. You start out writing towards this dream of publishing, but even if you've written the best book ever, it doesn't mean anyone cares. I remember getting my first book published and it sort of dawning on me that, as awesome as that is, and as awesome as it feels, I've got to go back to the same place at the desk regardless. Succeed or fail, you've got to get up the next day and just continue. It’s so much work to be a writer...
Actually, no. It’s not hard work. Writing's like going to the gym. If we could all be totally jacked and ripped by doing something horrible over a short period of time, say 48 hours, and afterwards we walk out of there and we’re cut, everyone would be in good shape. It doesn’t matter how horrible that would be. But if you have to do something that’s not all that bad, but you have to to do it today and tomorrow and the next day, and you don’t really see any progress – and even when you do see progress it’s so slow you don’t notice it on a day-to-day basis – that kind of process takes more than hard work. It takes some other quality of craziness.
Maybe that's the true grit they talk about. Okay, true grit, if you like. Basically, if you don’t love doing it, you need to do anything else. Because there’re easier ways to get rich. As a lawyer, I assure you there’re easier ways to get rich. If you’re going to do something you don't love, you should at least be getting rich so you can buy a boat or something. What’s the quote by Oscar Wilde? Something about the only reason to do a useless thing is you admire it intensely?
Clifford Jackman will be launching The Winter Family along with Lori Lansens and her new novel The Mountain Story in the eBar, Wednesday April 22nd at 7:00pm.
Awaiting the advance copy of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Dancing in the Dark, the 4th volume in his autobiographic novel My Struggle, I wondered, “Can he do it again?” The first three volumes deal individually with the death of Knausgaard’s father, his own second marriage, raising three children and struggle to mesh familial responsibilities with his writing passion, and lastly childhood in rural Norway. They have been greeted with international acclaim, termed addictive, selling ½ million copies in Norway alone and translated into 22 languages.
Dancing in the Dark is a story of adolescence. It focuses on a year as a temporary teacher in northern Norway, when Knausgaard was eighteen and fresh out of the gymnasium, taking his tentative first steps as a writer. To make the life of a teenager enthralling to others is a tall order indeed. And yet he does it – brilliantly and seemingly effortlessly.
The volume will no doubt draw comparisons to Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Karl Ove is the quintessential, angry and introspective teenager, self-consciously flouting society’s norms and standards, propelled by his hormones, lacking in self-understanding despite perpetual self-absorption. He details the primary preoccupations of existence, losing his virginity and changing his consciousness with alcohol. Obsessed with female attraction, each passing glance gives him a stiffy, but at every intimate moment, and there are many as Knausgaard is a handsome lad and the girls are willing, he is betrayed by the classic specter of male desire – premature ejaculation! So twisted does his sexuality become, that he rejects those for whom he feels most strongly. At the same time we witness his parent’s divorce and his father descent into alcoholism. The author’s own drunken blackouts take on a darker reverberation. Above all, Karl Ove is alive and perhaps learning too. Many will find it uproarious; every male will be touched by its authenticity.
Knausgaard has smashed through the boundaries of the autobiographic novel. He simultaneously answers David Copperfield’s question, “Whether I should turn out to be the hero of my own life…” with Flaubert’s novelistic injunction, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” His style is unique. The present is continually unfolding, approaching stream of consciousness, with obvious access to the author’s internal experience, but with detachment. Knausgaard remains an outsider, an observer especially of himself.
I wouldn’t recommend starting Knausgaard with Dancing in the Dark. These tales of a randy teenager, while a faithful depiction of Norway in the 80s with an ending worthy of Tom Jones, have greater resonance when placed beside other events in a life scrutinized and turned into art. I can’t wait for the next installment!
Let’s do something wonderful together on Saturday, May 2. It’s called Authors for Indies Day. That’s when authors across Canada support independent bookstores by volunteering as guest book sellers.
Independent bookstores enrich our communities. They provide gathering places for discovering new authors, sharing favourite books, and expanding our horizons. Store managers are thoughtful curators, bringing in books they know customers will love. Our neighbourhoods would be much diminished without our local bookstores.
So come out to the bookstores listed on your province’s page (see above) and meet a local author or two. Bring the family. Chat with us, reader to reader, about the books and authors you love and we’ll tell you about the ones we love. Most of all, come and get to know your local bookstore.
Warm regards, Ann-Marie MacDonald This year we're thrilled to be participating with a cadre of authors for Author For Indies Day. Check out the list of the scribes who'll be swinging by the store on May 2, 2015. If you identify as an Author – whether published or not – we'll be offering 30% off books to you.
Since 2006, Kazoo! has been importing the bands and artists you love and the bands and artists you didn't know you love into Guelph, whether as one-off shows (the tally of which is reaching the 200 mark) or within the cornucopia of Kazoo! Fest. From its humble begginings to it's current and growing status as force-to-be-reckoned-with, Kazoo! has always run on a tank of genuine, generous excitement for the acts it attracts, propelled by can-do organizers and volunteers.
Emboldened by a mutual interest in Guy Fieri, I bugged one such Kazoo!er, Mike Deane, for the inside scoop on this year's festival – you know, really tried to get an idea of the wax paper in the kazoo that makes the thing hum. - Andrew
Who on earth are you and what on earth do you do with Kazoo!?
Mike Deane, I am the Secretary and Treasurer for Kazoo!, as well as one of the programmers for year-round events and the Kazoo! Festival. I do some of everything for Kazoo! from the overall organization and booking bands to stapling Kazoo! Fest pamphlets to driving around and picking up gear to doing sound to letting bands sleep on my couch. The only thing I don't really have my hand in is the visual arts programming, because I know very little about it.
How'd you get mixed up with these guys? Maybe you could mention the other kids rowing this boat – if you leave anyone out, don't worry: they probably don't deserve mention in that case.
I moved to Guelph from Edmonton with my partner Kathy about 2.5 years ago. I grew up in Caledon, and after spending more than a decade in Montreal and Edmonton, we decided it was time to move to Ontario, but didn't want to move to Toronto. Honestly, we didn't know much about Guelph's arts scene when we moved here. Kathy had a good gig with the Waterloo School Board and I worked from home, and it just seemed like a nice place to settle down. Our good friend Todd lived here, and I knew Bry Webb from Southern Ontario punk days in the early 2000s, but other than that we were starting anew. I first heard of Kazoo! when I saw flyers around town for the U.S. Girls/Slim Twig/Legato Vipers/The Furys show at the ANAF shortly after I got here. I went to that and was blown away by how good it was and how many people were out there supporting it. It was a really great thing to witness, as I'd been involved in music in Montreal and Edmonton, but didn't know anything about music in Guelph.
Shortly after that I met Brad through my friends Marie and Aaron from Weird Canada, who had recently moved to Waterloo and were in town discussing something or other. I figured Kazoo! was some sort of established money-making concert promoter and figured if I wanted to bring bands to town I should do it on my own. I slowly figured out that Kazoo! was actually an artist- and volunteer-run promoter that literally made no money (all goes to bands and expenses) when I volunteered to help out at Kazoo! Fest in 2013. At this time I got to know Brad and Eihab a bit better, and understood more about the festival and the organization's mandate. I booked a few shows on my own the summer following Kazoo! Fest 2013, and Brad, who had been running Kazoo with Eihab for years (with a strong volunteer base for the festival), decided it was time to bring in some new blood to grow the festival, and essentially make sure he didn't burn himself out by single-handedly trying to do everything.
I joined the Kazoo! crew with David Lander, who had just moved back to Guelph from St. John's, and Brian Schirk, we got a board together (with the amazing and generous Danica Evering, Steph Yates and Scott McGovern), and we did some regular programming and Kazoo! Fest 2014. The festival was amazing, and was bigger and more celebrated than any of us thought it would be, with Danica and Scott handling a lot of the multimedia and arts programming, while Steph took the reins of volunteer organization, Audrey King handled a lot of the hospitality, and Brad, Dave, Brian and I contributed to the nuts and bolts, like dealing with contracts, renting gear, running shows, marketing, etc, etc etc. We worked on some shows throughout the year, and then started putting together the 2015 festival in October of 2014. Brian moved to Toronto and kept us informed of what was going on there. With all of us having input on music and arts programming this year, we put together dream-lists, contacted bands, Danica headed up the art curation, Steph took on the volunteer coordination, and we met every week for 6 months to make it happen. I would also like to point out how hard everyone on the team works. Dave and Brad have a drive I could only hope for, and are tremendously skilled with organizing, arts administration, and working like crazy to make things happen. Danica and Steph spend countless hours organizing, contacting bands and artists, reaching out to volunteers, hanging shows, finding venues, and together everyone's individual skills and output make the festival work.
Kazoo!'s been a "thing," putting on shows since 2006, right? How the hell do you stay cool and edgy after almost a decade? Especially since what's cool has changed at least seven times since then.
I can only speak for having been part of it for a few years, and I think a big part of keeping the programming relevant is having so many people helping make the decisions for programming at this point, and Brad's tireless community-mindedness and arts obsession over the past 8 years. I do a radio show at CFRU, which forces me to keep on top of lots of new music, and everyone else is a genuine music and art fan, so it's essentially about trying to find amazing bands that you want to see play in Guelph. I think we all have different tastes when it comes to music, so with Brad, Dave, Danica, Steph, and Brian's input, we get a very well-rounded list of bands we want to play. We also try to ensure that there is a good mix of genres and backgrounds represented, with bigger touring bands being paired with new and emerging bands. We essentially just want people to love the bands we love, and the art that was love, and be exposed to the amazing talent that may not be something you'd normally happen upon.
Do you kids approach each new Fest with a game plan or thesis? Or do you just throw darts at Bandcamp?
I think for the festival, the only guiding thesis is: Bring great music and art to Guelph for five days. There are definitely other considerations, like making sure the line-up is diverse, with something that will appeal to everyone, but other than that it's about talking to people, finding out what people love, figuring out what we love, and then trying to plan how all this will make sense over 5 days. There's not a "theme" every year, it's really all about quality, challenging, and amazing art making its way to Guelph.
Do you have a sense of the reputation Kazoo!'s establishing outside the blast zone of Southern Ontario? Are kids buying plane or train tickets to hit this thing up? Do you expect a line of cars wending off into the distance like that final scene of Field of Dreams?
Though it would be wonderful to enter into a Field of Dreams scenario (or, heck, I'd even take a situation like the end of that modern classic Pay It Forward), I think Kazoo!'s momentum is still building to that point. People come from Toronto, London, Hamilton, KW to see Kazoo!, but I don't know if we're at the plane ticket level yet. We try to expand our reach every year, and try to make it bigger and better every year to make sure that it draws people to Guelph. Last year was especially great, as you could walk around downtown Guelph and see people from all over Southern Ontario, going to local businesses, jumping around between shows, staying with friends, getting Air BnBs, just to come for five days. We're hoping for the same thing this year.
While Guelph's nowhere near the no-dancing town from Footloose, there's inevitably some chafing between the community and kids with electric instruments. But in its 8th year (correct?), Kazoo!'s starting to feel like its being a bit more seriously accepted by the city – something that the city's full-on proud of, something people will cite when they explain to their friends why they haven't moved to Toronto. Are all y'all Kazoo!ers feeling a bit more accepted?
I don't know if there's ever been any chafing with the local community (again, only been to two Kazoo! Fests). I've always found people of all walks are very accepting and encouraging of Kazoo! People in Guelph love Guelph, and they are usually excited by something that shows off the city to people outside. Also, I think there are enough genres represented (punk, indie, folk, experimental, electro, free jazz, hip hop, whatever), and enough free shows, all ages shows, family friendly shows, and accessible shows that people in Guelph understand we want them to be a part of this too. We want everyone to come out to shows, galleries, dance performances, pancake breakfasts, and experience music and art that would not be in Guelph without Kazoo! I'm really happy that you say that the people of Guelph are "full-on proud" of Kazoo! because it's something that we are hoping will enrich people's lives and make the place they call home more interesting and exciting.
Any advice on how a body can be in more than one place at a time? I assume you guys wouldn't have overlapping shows unless you knew about some sort of duplication device. I mean, you're not jerks, are you?
The organization of running shows is insane, and thankfully we have a ton of amazing volunteers that help out with everything. From volunteers running shows, doing merch, selling drinks, loading gear, cleaning up, doing sound, and more, there is so much support that allows us to make it happen. This is not to say that the whole Kazoo! crew will not be tired wrecks by Sunday morning, but at least we'll make it to Sunday morning without totally burning out.
Let's say I'm one of those people who peruses a Kazoo! Fest poster while waiting to get my coffee and am all like, "I've never even heard of any of these bands." Any advice for me? And don't just tell me to chill out.
First off: Chill out. After you're thoroughly chilled, read through the whole pamphlet, there are descriptions of every band, hopefully informing you of what to expect. We definitely try to include genre signifiers so that people who have never heard of a single band will still be interested in digging deeper into the line-up. As well, our site Kazookazoo.ca has links to music for every band. I also want to put it out there that I stand behind every show we've put together this year. I would be happy to go to any one of these shows, and the fact that there are 20 different music and dance performances, art shows, the print fair, and multimedia events to go to, there will definitely be something you enjoy. So, read the descriptions, get on the net, and just take a chance on anything you think might be interesting. All of the shows are affordable, some of them are free, some of them are Pay what you can, and most of them are all ages.
Why no alt swing bands on the bill? I didn't take all those swing dance lessons back in '97 not to see and enjoy alt swing bands in Guelph.
I was in direct contact with Big Bad VooDoo Daddy, The Cherry Poppin' Daddies, Squirrel Nut Zippers, and even Royal Crown Revue this year, but none of them could fit the festival into their very busy tour schedules. Don't throw out the fedora and watch-chain just yet, though. Next year there may be some zoot suit worthy bands.
Find a physical copy of this year's festival around town or get acquainted with the online version. Between rock shows, dance shows, art shows, and print shows, you can't throw a rock without hitting something worth checking out this year. The Bookshelf is getting in on the action, hosting a trio of shows:
April 8 - Absolutely Free/Tyvek/Badminton Racquet - $10 door/all ages April 9 - No Joy/Last Ex/Masques - $10 door/all ages
Back in the winter we had the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour, which tensely sat with an increasingly gaunt Edward Snowden as he was opening the can of NSA worms. The writhing, slimy contents announced that there's no such thing as privacy anymore. Suspicions we used to write off as tinfoil hat-style paranoia have pretty much been confirmed: our government is ogling us, collecting our minutia and forming opinions about us based on that. The revelations were the right mix of terrifying and depressing that I needed to just have a little lie down for a while. And yet, I'm not sure how scared we should be of our governments – or at least that threat is so large that it's vague, difficult to specifically sweat. Digesting Jon Ronson's new book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, I think it's each other that we really have to be more immediately and tangibly weary of. Yes the government is watching us, but we're also watching us, and I'd hazard to say that we're somewhat less responsible and more trigger-happy than our Western government. Collectively, we seem to be crouched in wait online, in our own social crows nest, ready to point out and punish any transgression that appears in our crosshairs. No mistake, from spelling and grammar flubs to unpopular political purviews, shall go unpunished. Our town squares no longer feature pillories, but we also don't really have town squares anymore either. Social media and comment sections have become the new gathering places, chockablock with soapboxes and stocks. Ronson finds this out first hand when another Jon Ronson, one with his face, starts Tweeting an unflattering, effete parody version of Ronson himself. The author tracked the doppelganger – an "infomorph" – down to some university kids. After a confrontation, they refused to kill the spambot, but agreed to sit down with the real Ronson for a YouTube interview. In the video, the academics explained that this was all a means of pointing out how identity is complicated in the digital age. The three come out looking absurd, and Ronson feels pretty chuffed with himself – he's caught, cornered, and shamed these academics. The comments on the video are likewise on his side, which he's likewise happy about, until they take on a tone beyond support. "These fucked up academics deserve to die painfully," reads one comment. And it's then that Ronson starts to understand and worry about the public forum he's brought his beef to, the public that he's appealed to. From there, Ronson sets off into the sometimes brave, sometimes callow new world of public shaming, talking to those who've had their lives dismantled, those who've triggered and participated in this undoing, and those who make a living helping the shamed take back their online identity. He talks with Jonah Lehrer, who was caught fudging Bob Dylan quotes and then subsequently agreed to perform a public apology in front of a live Twitter feed dressing him down in real time. And he spends considerable time with Justine Sacco, the publicist with only 100 Twitter followers who drew the ire of the whole world when she made an awkward joke about AIDS just as she was boarding a plane to Africa. While she was in the air, the Tweet had gone beyond her 100 followers – people who ostensibly knew Justine well enough to know that she was trying and failing to be sarcastic about white privilege – reaching an online world that wanted her head. The whole Internet waited for her to land, an execution pulled off like a surprise party, eager for her to discover that they – we – had judged and juried her before she even knew she'd been caught.
Looking at it that way, we're terrible people, behaved more rashly and callously than Justine might have in her Tweet, as we perceived it. But we ripped her apart on the side of right, we probably all thought. Ronson also talks to Ted Poe, the former Houston judge who became famous for punishing criminals through wacky public scenarios, or, as one of his critics put it, "using citizens as virtual props in his personal theater of the absurd." Poe's argument is that some people feel too good about themselves, and this pride is a key ingredient in their transgressions. Humiliate them, destroy their confidence, and you cut down on recidivism. Maybe we don't use that much forethought, but the germ of that idea in active every time we dig into someone online. Putting a comment on the Internet is about as easing as falling off a bike. We share articles or videos or pictures, glance at them – some for longer than other, birthing the Internet abbreviation "tl;dr" (too long; didn't read) – and weigh in. Thanks to accessibility, we find ourselves involved in the ideas and deeds of people we don't know and will never meet. Of course, this boundless interaction is a great way for us to shed light on moral or political or personal issues in a world we don't directly live in but are all a part of. But it's also a great way for us to be bored assholes who forget that the cranky, petty, thoughtless stuff we do and say and share on the Internet registers IRL. Arguably, there's a healthy element to shame. It's how morals and mores
are preserved in communities. It's a way of calibrating. Jonah Lehrer's
journalistic malfeasance absolutely should have been brought out into
the open and Justine Sacco's joke wasn't very funny. But did the
punishments fit the crimes? Was the shaming productive or just
destructive? The problem with mass engagement such as our online
interaction produces, is that there's little room for nuance. I'm sure few if any of us would ever wish someone dead in an Internet comment, but everyone takes part in communal, cumulative misunderstanding. Bolstered by a mix of anonymity, ease, and idleness, we get involved without having to get involved. With no skin in the game, our capacity to react and opine is boundless. The momentum of online opinion reminds me a bit of a firing squad in which only one undisclosed gun is loaded – everyone could be the executioner, so no one is. In another way, it's death by a thousand pricks. We have access to, and open ourselves up to, each others lives in a way the NSA couldn't even dream. But we can get away with it because none of us think there's actually a bullet in our gun.
So You've Been Publicly Shamed makes for an always entertaining, finally frightening reminder that you, me, and everyone we know are packing heat.
A day doesn’t stroll by where I don’t trip over a pile of books touting the transformative power of something. Diets, revolutionary technologies, environmental fixes, economic or fashion makeovers stack up on the monetized horizon of Big Change. Grand revisions certainly do stir the abstract volumes of this idealist’s stockpiling heart, but I’m always happiest to find a book that maps the progressive directions we can saunter if we fully explore what we’re already good at. Then in walks journalist Dan Rubinstein’s Born to Walk: The Transformative Power of a Pedestrian Act (ECW Press) with its tour of the possibilities, impasses, and, ultimate benefits, of putting one foot ahead of the other in our automated and ecologically fragile trudge. Shadowing the likes of doctors, politicians, academics, inventors, activists, police officers, urban explorers as they stride, Rubenstein covers a varied, person-paced landscape. Studies and stories mount to confirm that walking steadily reduces violent crime, alienation, distractibility, depression, and other public health problems, while putting urban planning, political awareness, and (social, perceptual, and ecological) connectivity on firmer footing. By outlining some of the many everyday approaches to what used to be way we mostly got around, Rubenstein makes a moving case for getting off our ideal asses and getting more done.
Brad de Roo – who, before he got a big stereo to popularly channel his teenage suburban rage, used to take three-hour walks along the drained creek-beds, earmarked woodlots, and forest-branded strip malls to see what was going on
What about walkers moves you? Do you have favourites? One
of the people I spent time with for the book was a man in New York City
named Matt Green, who is walking every block of every borough. He
started on New Year’s Day, 2012, and he’s about a year away from
finishing. Matt blogs about his walks (imjustwalkin.com), but that’s not
the point of his project. He’s doing this, in his words, to submit to a
“constant, wide-ranging, uncurated flow of stimulation and information
that overwhelms our innate tendency to try to fit everything into a neat
and tidy set of preconceptions.” I love that! He’s walking to
demonstrate that every place can be interesting and engaging, if you
explore its fine-grained textures on foot. That it's hard to really know
if you’re going to like something unless you give yourself a chance to
experience it. But really, all of the people I walked with and write
about in the book, from Innu surgeon Dr. Stanley Vollant to British MP
Rory Stewart, from members of the health walk group in Glasgow to the
beat cops in Philadelphia, were inspiring. They’re demonstrating that
even — or especially — in places where people face significant
obstacles, walking can help swing the pendulum back toward healing.
What
about walking authors? Is there a fictional or poetical expression of
walking that epiphanically gets under your feet or which sets you on
track?
As much as I respect and admire (and am humbled by)
authors such as Rebecca Solnit and Bruce Chatwin, and other iconic
figures in walking literature going back hundreds of years, as a
lifelong journalist, I often find that when I read writing about walking
that takes a philosophical or poetic approach, I want something
different — something more pragmatic, more directly related to the
overarching social challenges we are facing today. Rory Stewart’s book
about walking across Afghanistan, The Places in Between, is a step in
this direction — his experiences give him tremendous insight, for
instance, when speaking about the pros and cons of international
intervention in foreign conflict. I’m also drawn to the work of city
planners such as Jeff Speck (Walkable City), and Canadian writers like
Charles Montgomery (The Happy City) and Trevor Herriot (The Road is
How), because their books address specific aspects of walking — the
ability of urban walkability to make our cities more functional, and the
spiritual properties of a good long walk, respectively. What I tried to
do in Born to Walk was connect a lot of disparate dots — ideas that
doctors, scientists, urban planners, politicians, economists, artists,
historians, pilgrims and other writers have explored, but ideas that
have not necessarily been linked together in a logical narrative. And
the foundation beneath this was the work of other writers.
Your book clips along at steady pace, interweaving the various narratives of walkers into a single path. Does this form have any parallels in the way you walk? The way your mind walks?
There’s no conscious link between walking and the way I write, but every story is like a journey, whether it’s an entire book or the chapters that comprise a book, so there is a definite parallel. When walking or writing, you have a starting point and an end point, and you don’t necessarily take a linear route from one to the other. The best narratives, and the best journeys, meander. It’s fun to wander down tangential side paths, even if you have a specific destination in mind; you’re going to get there ultimately, and will be richer for the experiences you have along the way. The people who populate my book, no matter how different they are, I saw them all as part of the same whole — an interest in walking was the narrative through-line that connected them, but they each represented a spur trail, and most of these side routes eventually linked back to the main path (or argument). I do get ideas when I’m out walking. Concepts crystallize when I’m heading somewhere on foot. If I’m struggling with a particular passage, walking can provide the creative energy I need to break through. But because I’ve been writing about walking, sometimes going for a walk only made the writer’s block worse. I’d be thinking so much about one particular aspect of walking meant that getting out for some air wasn’t a mental break at all. But even if there was no breakthrough during a walk, the answer or idea would often come to me later; the effort would pay off. While discussing long-distance pilgrimages you suggest that you are less about grand walks and more keen on incorporating walking culture into your everyday. Having said this, are there any celebrated walks you'd just love to take on?
I would love to walk on gorgeous trails through distant landscapes, and on ancient routes through distant cultures. Anywhere. Patagonia comes to mind, thanks to Bruce Chatwin. New Zealand is spectacular, I’ve been told by many people. And there are routes in Asia and Africa, of course, that people have been walking for centuries. Going on a trek along one of these trails would be an immersion into a culture or landscape I do not know; it would be challenging and fascinating and I would learn a hell of a lot. But shorter walks close to home, or longer walks elsewhere in Canada, can also be extremely powerful. They impact your relationship to the people and places where you are, and you see yourself as part of one contiguous community, one contiguous ecosystem. I believe in trying to make change in your own backyard. That whole “think global, act local” thing. And to me, there’s no better way to gain a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the city or country where you live than by walking through it. What are the greatest current impediments to walking culture in Canada? Do different provinces have different challenges?
The greatest impediments are our fixation on speed and instant gratification, our thirst for big returns on small investments, our obsession with technology (and technological solutionism), media-fuelled fear of the unknown — and plain old-fashioned greed and laziness. And our obsession with cars. Basically, we want results now, we think mostly about ourselves and our own families and friends, and we don’t pause to consider the broader environmental impacts of how we’re living, and the dangers of growing economic inequality. These impediments are fairly consist across Canada. They differ slightly from region to region, from city to city (i.e., Toronto has more of a pedestrian culture than, say, Moncton — two cities I have lived in). The differences are more pronounced between American cities: car-centric Houston compared to, say, progressive Portland, Oregon. Did your
research give examples of places or cultures with better relationships
to walking than North America? Who walks the most? What can we learn
from their approaches?
The Scandinavians are pretty good at
walking (as they are at many things). Plans for a pedestrian mall in
Copenhagen were criticized before it was built because it’s a cold,
northern city, but when it opened people thronged there, year round. New
York and San Francisco are great cities for walkers; they’re dense and
lively and are regarded as two of the continent’s walking Meccas. And
they’re reaping the economic and social benefits of having a vibrant
walking culture. In much of the world, especially in developing
countries in Africa and Asia, walking is not a matter of choice but a
challenging necessity for millions of people — that’s a different
ballgame than the Anglosphere that I write about. But there are examples
we can learn from throughout North America and Western Europe. Impose a
levy on cars entering the downtown core, as in London. Invest is urban
mass transit, like Washington, D.C., did during the freeway-building era
in the U.S. Or do what New York City did to encourage cycling: it took
one percent of roadway space a year for 10 years and built bike lanes,
so the changes were incremental, but at the end of the decade, it had a
great system for cyclists. Many of the walkers you shadow throughout your book seem to be trying to find a more present or embodying world to supplement, or even, replace an abstract, technologically mediated one. Books like End of Absence by Michael Harris or The Glass Cage by Nicolas Carr explore alienation in our time of omnipresent digital connection and automation. Is Born to Walk akin to these explorations?
I don’t have a cellphone. I like to be where I am. My wife and I have an idea we call “the outernet.” It’s like the internet: you can ask questions and learn things, be entertained, “like” things and have “friends,” only it’s all tangible and real. Walking is an ideal way to explore the outernet. A lot of people have lost touch with the physical world in which they live. They’re not outdoors and active, which is why they’re overweight and don’t know their neighbours. They’re glued to screens, which is why they’re hooked on news about celebrity and lurid crimes on the other side of the planet, not tuned in to what’s happening down the street. Unplugged walking connects you to the sights, sounds, smells and rhythms of the places where you spend time. Absolutely, I see Born to Walk as part of a continuum that include books such as The End of Absence.
What was the most affecting fact you unearthed about walking? Why did it affect you so?
Walking makes you healthier and happier, and will help you live longer. Lots of the smaller facts and details and anecdotes I encountered were very striking, but basic life advice doesn’t get much more clear than that. What advice would you offer a new urban ambler?
My manifesto is three words long. Walk more, anywhere. Whether you’re in the suburbs or have to pass through an industrial park, whether it’s raining or -30 C, walk — you never know what you’ll discover along the way. About the places you pass through, the people you meet — and, of course, about yourself.
Has writing this book put you on the path to any new projects?
I’d love to help make a documentary film about walking, and I’m collaborating with an organization that’s hoping to mount a visual arts exhibition with a walking theme, and still I’m writing some magazine stories about walking that pick up some of the threads I started to unravel in the book. So I’m still very much immersed in walking, though I imagine that I will soon tire of this subject and want to write about entirely different. Born to Sit, perhaps?
The development and refinement of the short story in the early- to mid-century owes so much thanks to economics. A guy could make a nice little living selling fiction to magazines. The stuff didn't need to be good, either, and a lot of it wasn't. The short story was primarily entertainment, it's place in the home was the living room, where it would be gradually replaced by TV. The short fiction of the time, like its usurper, was a mix of junk and art, a venue where the best and the worst artists stretched their legs and stuffed their wallet.
I know we hate to talk about art's interactions with business, but it is an essential element to the short story's maturation. When given the incentive to write often and for as many marketplaces as possible, a writer is lured into territories they might otherwise eschew, an incentive that produced some of the most versatile voices of the century. Though he's responsible for some of the best generation-defining short fiction of the 20s, F. Scott Fitzgerald – thanks to financial straits – was compelled to write some of the best, weirdest genre fiction of the era. And Raymond Chandler, eventually considered one of the best presenters of a gritty, American moral bankruptcy, was attracted to the pulp fiction that would come define him almost solely because he could make a quick buck. And, of course, Kurt Vonnegut's teeth got cut working his way up from the sci-fi rags to the "slicks," and his revolutionary style a melange of his high and low experience.
But then there are writers, mostly relegated to the genre writer distinction, like Theodore Sturgeon (the basis for Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout, if you didn't know), Ray Bradbury, and Harlan Ellison who could write any story for any venue. These were giants created and supported by their environment, who went on to thrive in and define various venues. Throughout their careers, they'd be putting out a new collection of short stories every few years, producing collected short fictions that would bow most bookshelves.
A notorious and lithe genre hopper, Jonathan Lethem has been publishing for about 25 years now. His novels range from western, sci-fi, detective, and straightforward social commentary. Recently, he published his third collection of short stories, Lucky Alan. I received these new stories with unbridled enthusiasm – they're as good as anything Lethem has done – but, a drop of ink in that pure milky glee, I can't believe that this is only Lethem's third collection. And each new book of short stories seems to be shrinking, and the range of publications they originally appeared in has likewise dwindled to mostly The New Yorker. It's a hypothetical shame, as Lethem has all the makings of those aforementioned masters. He's one of those rare writers who brings both a learned intelligence and a limitless imagination to his work. With the right impetus, he could be similarly publishing constantly, collecting the best of it consistently. In 2012, Lethem
put out the 500-page collection of non-fiction, The Ecstasy of
Influence. This, in addition to a previous collection of non-fiction,
as well as short studies of the film They Live and the album Fear of
Music. The breadth of Lethem's interests is fully on display in Ecstasy, ably
lillypadding from all manner of cultural subjects. It's a wonderful collection, and I wouldn't trade it for anything, but it also makes for
something of a dousing rod, shivering in the direction of money.
No one's getting rich or anything, but this does shine a light on an interesting trend: creative non-fiction has been slowly moving into the magazine spaces once occupied by short fiction. It's odd to think that, if they were writing today, F. Scott Fitzgerald would be writing reviews of the new season of Girls, Raymond Chandler opining about Adam Sandler's place in Hollywood. There's no
shortage of short story collections every year, a surprising amount of which are
great. But they never seem to accrue to much. Few are the writers who
stick with the short story long enough to really make it work. Names
like Alice Munro, or Lorrie Moore, or George Saunders are exceptions.
Few collections of short stories sell much, and there are few and fewer
venues who pay well to publish individual ones. The conditions just aren't conducive to long burns.
In this a bad thing? Not necessarily. I love short stories probably more than the next guy, but it's hard to argue with the free market. The balance isn't always perfectly calibrated, but for the most part what gets published is what people want to read, what people will buy. But at the same time, I do get a little winsome thinking about alternate realities and alternate careers. I look at the three books of Jonathan Lethem's short fiction I've got on my shelf and wish that shelf drooped under the weight of more of them.
